Our contribution to innovation
Using The Lens, a patent and scholarly literature search facility, we find that ELIXIR resources are increasingly mentioned by name in patent applications. This is a clear indication of their usefulness to bioinformaticians of all sectors (academic, industry), and across the globe. We will soon expand our search to cover all ELIXIR resources, a number of which existed before ELIXIR became operational as a distributed research infrastructure. Our approach is loosely inspired from earlier ELIXIR work (Bousfield et al. 2016), but less computationally intensive, yet lightweight and repeatable so as to operationalise it as an indicator. This is considered to be a qualitative exercise as identical patent applications are known to be submitted in various jurisdictions by their authors. The apparent drop in mentions in recent years is likely a reflection of wider economic downturn, post-COVID, in the biotechnology sector. EP: European Patent Office. Access the full visualisations in tableau. Support from the EU-funded PathOS project.
Impact areas to which we contribute
Using a simplified interpretation of the International Patent Classification (IPCR), patent applications mentioning ELIXIR resource names can be visualised by main fields of use. The qualitative and high-level visualisation below summarises the main impact areas to which ELIXIR resources contribute. Note that many patent applications list several IPCR classes, and that tile size is only loosely related to the number of mentions. Access the full visualisations in tableau. Support from the EU-funded PathOS project.
